Flawed Rotten Tomatoes ratings

Rotten Tomatoes aggregates movie reviews to spit out a freshness score for each film. There’s a problem though. For Vulture, Lane Brown reports on the flawed system:

But despite Rotten Tomatoes’ reputed importance, it’s worth a reminder: Its math stinks. Scores are calculated by classifying each review as either positive or negative and then dividing the number of positives by the total. That’s the whole formula. Every review carries the same weight whether it runs in a major newspaper or a Substack with a dozen subscribers.

If a review straddles positive and negative, too bad. “I read some reviews of my own films where the writer might say that he doesn’t think that I pull something off, but, boy, is it interesting in the way that I don’t pull it off,” says Schrader, a former critic. “To me, that’s a good review, but it would count as negative on Rotten Tomatoes.”

Studios have of course learned how to game the system, not to mention most of the site is now owned by movie ticket seller Fandango.

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How the Longest Running Shows Rated Over Episodes

Most television shows don't get past the first season, but there are some that manage to stick around. These are the 175 longest running shows on IMDb that have ratings.

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Heatmap of average IMDb ratings for all the shows

Inspired by a graphic on Reddit, Jim Vallandingham expanded the format for all the shows. Search for a show and get a heatmap for average ratings by season and episode. See how your favorite show went into the dumpster at the end or withstood the test of time. Nice.

The data comes from IMDb Datasets, which seems like a fun time series dataset to poke at.

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How online school ratings are flawed

Standardized ratings are a challenge, because they often try to encapsulate many variables into a single variable. On the upside, a single score is quick and easy to see, but on the downside, variance goes into hiding and people/things that don’t fit a defined standard get dinged.

Vox looks at these challenges in the context of online school ratings.

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Game of Thrones viewer ratings by season

The last episode is coming. Some people don’t like how it’s ending, and the IMDB ratings seem to reflect this. For The Upshot, Josh Katz and K.K. Rebecca Lai charted the changes over the seasons.

Reminds of me of the (now defunct) Graph TV a while back.

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